Post by Nuallán in Retro Diffusion Extension for Aseprite comments

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Alright, so this is an attempt to make a fair and balanced review. Instead of telling you whether or not you should get it, I'll give you my first takes on this software as raw data and let you decide for yourself, cheers.

Pros

Firstly, I can attest that this software does indeed work. (Included below, it's not a great chest but it's what I got on my first try.) And I've included a cute little image of a chest that I made to test it out.
Specialized with Aesprite which means that you can immediately get to working on the sprite as soon as it rolls in.
Creates sprite art in a more niche market for game developers in a popular sprite-making software.
Has cute little beep noises to let you know which parts of the process you're on and when it's done.
Has differentiated models for portraits, objects, architecture, etc.
The tiling feature does work. (Example shown below.) Sadly it seems fairly limited and does stone and grass textures more than things like wall textures and floorboards, etc.

Cons

The price. At the time of writing it's a whopping $65. This is fairly shocking as there's already other models out there that can handle sprite art very well without a lot of the downsides that this one has.
It has you install Python and Git, which for some can be pretty scary and some more paranoid folks would want to know that coming in for fear of computer hijackings, data theft and the like. If I suddenly go quiet or start acting funny on here, or this account becomes a glaringly good review, you know what happened. :)
I couldn't actually get this thing to make a character portrait... I tried a few times and in a few different ways and it just never created one. I got some cute full-body sprite art, but not portraits. Also I noticed that while the AI is very cute and does the style well, it has trouble creating what you're describing and tends to default to something close but not quite. (Example of the little fox-monk I tried to get as a portrait but instead got full-body sprite of art included below.)
Speed and CPU use may be problematic for some. My PC actually started to overheat a little and the only other time I've had that happen was running a game of UEBS 2 with a truly disgusting number of troops deployed. I can't for the life of me figure out why this would cause my CPU to overheat like that where cutting edge games don't. But I'm not exactly an AI expert.

Astropulse173 days ago(+1)

Hey! Thanks for the review!

Here's some tips for tiling and portraits:

With tiling, there are two options that do different things. The "Tile X direction" and "Tile Y direction" can be made visible by toggling "Show advanced options", these settings mathematically force the image to tile. This can be great when you need something to tile that normally wouldn't, but its also very heavy handed and can make weird stuff.
The second option is to enable the "Tiling" modifier. This is a specialized image generator that has been trained on tiling textures, stuff like Minecraft blocks. It works best at 16x16 or 32x32.

For portraits, typically putting something like "A close up portrait of ___" or "A headshot of ___" will do the trick. For example here is "A close up portrait of a fox monk" with all other settings at default values:

On speed and CPU usage:

AI image creation is actually one of the most complex tasks computers can do, when you boil it down, its essentially solving differential equations with billions of inputs and outputs. Way more demanding than any AAA game, or even most 3D rendering software, even for small pixel art images. This is why the compatibility section is so strict.

We've managed to get the requirements down to a 4GB GPU, which is pretty impressive given the size of the models and the complexity of the computations. You can find system requirements and some benchmark data above on the main page.

Again thanks for the review, and I hope it helps people with the decision to buy or not!

Nuallán173 days ago(+1)

Thanks for the feedback, some very useful info. And it's a fascinating thing on the CPU usage, it makes a lot of sense given the nature of AI. Keep up the great work. :)

Dan Lowe13 days ago

Not to use Astropulse's comments as a discussion board but could you point out some of the other models that handle sprite art well? The $65 seems pretty good when you consider API/token costs but I'm curious to see what is out there. I follow a lot of AI projects but admittedly none dedicated to pixel art

Nuallán13 days ago(+1)

Fair enough. In retrospect I admit I really should have phrased my review a bit better. What I should have said is that I know of AI that can get close-enough to a pixelated style to create some very impressive images with some minor alterations. And that's my bad, my apologies. I've also softened my views on Retro Diffusion since I first wrote that review as the style has grown on me even if I don't use it. It does do something that is fairly unique in the AI field (at least as far as I know) and for that it is a great service that I hope to see further refined. If you feel that it's worth the cost, then don't let me dissuade you. By all means use it, I won't judge. I'm sure Mr. Astropulse would appreciate your business and perhaps use the money to make better models for us in the future.

Still, I didn't want you to go away empty-handed so I've got two quick examples below that I think can illustrate that other AIs can make some very pretty sprite art. Please note that I did shrink these down to 128x128 pixels in my (20-year-old) version of Photoshop using 'nearest neighbor' resampling to make them look more convincing as pixel art as the original images did have some odd artifacting. Still, I think it should help illustrate what these two can do for some very convincing sprite art with the software. With a few alterations these could be indistinguishable from the genuine article.

Anyways, best of luck to you. Cheers!

Knight Portrait: Created in Bing AI using a custom pixel art prompt I created.

Man with Barrel: created with Chat GPT requesting a picture of a man struggling to lift a barrel in a sprite art style.

Dan Lowe12 days ago (1 edit)

Hey thanks for replying. I'll post this in posterity so I can stop tiptoeing around the idea publicly. @ you but also just @ the idea of using 20 year old photoshop which is the clutchest sht I truly idolize. Swiftkey dvorak and autocomplete is a curse and if it seems long don't read it (I already agree with you)

I was just in the mindset pricing some tools/tokens this last few weeks not even to generate new art but pixelate images or 3D models into pixel art in 'my' style so I didn't have keep stitching it. The pixelizer effect alone built into this is worth 1/3rd of the price or more and then you're just looking at a month of subscription costs if you trust this to produce a particular effect. You could also do it with cameras and frame grabbing in unity but the time to learn it alone in my experience has been frustrating. Even what you just did here takes either photoshop or a knowledge of their free online tools/GIMP or the great photoscape (see the rabbit hole if you're a complete amateur). If you're wanting to make 500, or in my hope 500,000,000 unique NPCs in a pixel art game this tool opens up whole new procedural dreams I've had for decades. I play elite dangerous, no man's sky and single player vanilla minecraft. give me any procgen in any methodology and I am very happy.

The big AI companies must be panicking to switch to real-time video because this kind of app is going to replace the need to ever buy tokens on someone else's server or get photoshop etc, especially if they let people copyright pixel art any much more before every pixel location style has been churned out by some asset seller and only homebrew is allowed with some kind of cultural tip/donation peer pressure to replace litigation over copywritten nintendo pixel art games. (Thank everyone who has released stuff on CC licenses so far, it may be the only hope and we need to reward all the existing pixel artists by buying their games or getting them art grants etc because there's no way that games as a medium can survive anyone hoarding a style of pixel art through copyright. It just needs to be referential and not profitable for someone who can straight rip it off or have a robot rip it off.)

Homebrewed, in house trained models are something else and I am so ready for them in a pajama sunday JRPG message board space. I call this sort of app a log cabin game. Power's out, there's no internet. Just a fire going and winter outside. You'll have to go to bed before the laptop battery runs dry. The scourge of the dotcom to web3 era has to leave us old ladies something. Once you disappear into the hills like I have these offline tools are a place to relive deep, retail nostalgia currently/ironically displaced by current smartphone surveillance craze

PS I love Bing image generator and use it to make all my out of the park baseball player photos. This might be even more archaic as a topic but it's lowkey unfair to MLBPA to have historically made sports stats a public event that can be reported in the public domain if you care about their rights as laborers/etc. I don't need to follow real life sports at their ticket/parking/satellite tv rates and am very close to just simulating batted ball baseball. vin scully voice gen, ken burns documentaries, none of which existed in real life or will ever be marketed to anyone but myself in private. I have to go to a gym or pay bills or I would already be retired in my 30s because my life is complete

Nuallán12 days ago(+1)

Thanks, many people underestimate the power of older Photoshop versions. Sure, they don't have all the bells and whistles of the new ones, but I can still do a lot more on mine than most people can on gimp, including mass-automation. The downside is that if I have too much space on my hard drive the software assumes I have zero space on my hard drive and wont' boot up, so I had to install hundreds of gigabytes of games to get it to run. XD

Speaking of licensing. The weird part about AI art? You can't copyright it as-is. Companies cannot legally copyright works generated with their model. That's also why you don't see a lot of big companies (knowingly) using AI art because it could feasibly mean losing the rights to their IPs. That's why I see AI art more as the tool of the indie game dev and hobbyist rather than that of the big companies.

Also, here's a thought for you. There are some prompts that you can get on sites like prompt base to generate entire sheets of sprite art. That may help you in your quest to get 500,000,000 NPCs. I mean heck, even if you only pull about 3 sprites per sheet you're at least cutting those generations down to a third.

Anyways, take care and best of luck. Cheers!

itch.io

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